Minibeasts Stay & Play - May 2019

17th May 2019

The warm weather held for our most recent Stay & Play
session about Minibeasts. Steve from
Wild Workshops spent the whole day with us, and delivered small group hands-on
sessions with every child, where we got to handle a wide selection of
minibeasts including snails, woodlice, centipedes, millipedes, ladybirds,
beetles and spiders!

Steve showed the children how to move the minibeasts
carefully from the boxes into the magnifiers so that they could see them up
close and count their legs. The children
were fantastic at doing this, handling the equipment and the creatures with
great care and skill, needing no help!

We also got to look at some of the minibeasts using Steve’s
digital microscope – we watched a snail breathe and saw its antennae
unfurl! Steve also used the microscope
to show us our very own caterpillars, and we saw that they have golden
spikes! (We also had a close look at
some knee scabs, which the children thought was very ‘cool’, and looked at
pollen from a dandelion on our fingers).

When the parents arrived, Steve delivered a short workshop
explaining how we classify minibeasts (they have no internal skeleton), and
then the children showed their parents how to safely handle minibeasts and use
the magnifiers. Once we’d all had some
practice, we moved outside to go on our own minibeast hunt. We found our very own ‘ladybird tree’,
covered in ladybirds, and found some ladybird eggs which we’re going to watch
in Nursery alongside our caterpillars and tadpoles.

Finally, Steve showed us a frog with very long legs (which
jumped quickly!) and we all had the chance to hold a house mouse which he had
brought for us to see.

This was a fun-filled, action-packed Stay & Play which
we all really enjoyed – we learnt so much, and as Steve reminded us at the end
of the session, all of this wonderful nature can be found in our gardens and
local parks.